Flávio Rebouças

Like any industrious coastal town or city, Rio de Janeiro's port region has always been a hub for the confluence of cultures, nationalities and identities. Since 2013, it has also formed the basis of a research project for filmmaker Julia De Simone. Her third feature-length film – which was supported by IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund in 2014 – shifts away from straightforward documentary and towards a more fictionalised form as it presents the story of Muanza, a woman born in the Kingdom of Kongo in the early nineteenth century and trafficked to Brazil, who awakens to find herself in the present, roaming the streets of Rio’s rapidly changing port region, known as ‘Pequena Africa’, or Little Africa.

Armed with music and a message, influential hip-hop group Racionais MC's turned their street poetry into a powerful movement in Brazil and beyond.

Armed with music and a message, influential hip-hop group Racionais MC's turned their street poetry into a powerful movement in Brazil and beyond.

In 1999, 11-year-old Nisha Platzer lost her older brother, Josh, to suicide. Twenty years later, her search for a specialized medical treatment leads her to the door of someone who was once exceptionally close to Josh. And so it is that she finally has the chance to truly know her brother through his chosen family. Captured over five years in which synchronicities continually manifested, Platzer’s documentation of these encounters gently asserts that both grieving and healing are meant to be communal experiences.

Every year, a 67-year-old woman celebrates her 7th birthday.

In the dense night, when the moon lifts the tide, beings trapped in the daily life of water scarcity, they are hypnotized by the powers of Yemaya, the goddess of the sea.

In the dense night, when the moon lifts the tide, beings trapped in the daily life of water scarcity, they are hypnotized by the powers of Yemaya, the goddess of the sea.